After travelling to the United Kingdom for two years and working as a clerk on his return, he was convicted of indecent assault for a homosexual encounter and moved to live on his uncle's farm for a period.
Having already written and published some short stories in the late 1920s, he began to focus on his writing and moved into his parents' holiday cottage where he would live for the rest of his life.
[2] Sargeson is known for his minimalist and sparse style, with a focus on unhappy and isolated male characters, and has been credited with introducing everyday New Zealand English to literature.
[3] Although later in life Sargeson became known for his literary depiction of the laconic and unsophisticated New Zealand working-class men, his upbringing was comfortable and middle-class, if puritanical; his father, Edwin Davey, was the Hamilton town clerk and an active campaigner against social ills such as alcohol and gambling.
From 1921 onwards he worked in solicitors' offices and studied law by distance through Auckland University College,[5] as well as spending time at the farm of his mother's brother, Oakley Sargeson, in Ōkahukura, King Country.
In 1929, as a condition of a two-year suspended sentence he received for indecent assault due to a homosexual encounter, he was required to leave Wellington to live with his uncle in Ōkahukura, where he spent 18 months working on the farm and writing.
[2] The bach was primitive and was described by Sargeson as "nothing more than a small one-roomed hut in a quiet street ending in a no-man's land of mangrove mud-flats that belonged to the inner harbour.
[3] Early on he registered for unemployment benefits in order to be able to spend as much time as possible writing; he said he wished to produce work "which would be marked by an individual flavour: there would be a certain quality which would be recognised as my own and nobody else's".
[3] In late 1939, Sargeson was diagnosed with surgical tuberculosis, which meant he was excused from conscription in World War II and eligible for an invalid's benefit.
[3] He was also receiving international attention, with his work appearing in journals in Australia, the UK and the USA, in John Lehmann's anthologies and periodicals such as Penguin New Writing.
[3] The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (2006) said that Sargeson "dominated" New Zealand short fiction at this time, with his "wry sketches or ostensible yarns about apparently undistinguished characters and minor occurrences", in which "the characters are depicted as itinerant labourers or unemployed men, seldom happily married and frequently without any apparent family connection".
[2] He also was increasingly becoming part of the New Zealand literary community through his friendships with other local writers (including A. R. D. Fairburn, Robin Hyde, Jane Mander, Denis Glover and others).
[16] Sargeson continued to nurture and promote New Zealand literary talent, as he had with Speaking for Ourselves, most notably by inviting the young author and poet Janet Frame to live in the former army hut on his property in 1955, not long after her discharge from Seacliff Lunatic Asylum.
[17]: 123–4 She lived and worked in the army hut from April 1955 to July 1956, producing her first full-length novel Owls Do Cry (Pegasus, 1957),[17]: 133 which is considered a masterpiece of New Zealand writing.
The letter praised Sargeson for his contributions to New Zealand literature, saying that he had "proved that a New Zealander could publish work true to his own country and of a high degree of artistry, and that exile in the cultural centres of the old world was not necessary to this end", and "revealed that our manners and behaviour formed just as good a basis for enduring literature as those of any other country".
[23] The two plays he had begun in the 1950s, the comedy The Cradle and the Egg and the drama A Time For Sowing, were both produced in Auckland in the early 1960s,[3] and published under the title of Wrestling with the Angel (1964).